The Docile Servant
Kristi Noem and the Pedagogy of Disposability
Honz Fuller, a junior and student body vice president at Lakota Tech High School, stood before South Dakota’s Board of Education Standards on April 17, 2023, and said: “This land is built and founded on not only the erasure, but the genocide of native people. There may be a long road of reparations ahead of us to heal this deep wound, but we can start by adjusting the curriculum standards to be fair to native people.”
He was not alone in the room. Outside the Ramkota Hotel in Pierre that morning, educators and children had lined the sidewalks in protest. Nearly 1,300 public comments had been submitted against the proposed standards over the preceding months. The South Dakota Education Association opposed them. The nine Tribes of South Dakota had issued a joint statement of opposition. Terry Nebelsick, the board president, who had spent four decades working in South Dakota’s public schools, announced at the close of the hearing that he would vote against adoption.
The board voted 5-2 to adopt the standards anyway. Governor Noem was not in the room. She celebrated the passage by press release. “Today is a wonderful day for the students in South Dakota,” she said. “Now, they will be taught the best social studies education in the country.” Fuller’s testimony is in the official record. The standards were not revised. What happened in Pierre is what Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, called normalization: the process by which institutions produce compliant subjects not through force but through procedure, not through suppression but through the dignified absorption of dissent into official record. The board did not need to refuse Fuller. It welcomed him, documented him, and continued. The process itself was the instrument.
The “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools,” which Noem signed as the first officeholder to do so, did not prohibit historical distortion. It prohibited the discomfort that history, accurately taught, produces, barring any curriculum that, in its own language, “pits students against one another on the basis of race or sex.” The pledge operated on what schools were permitted to teach. The ESA proposal operated on who could afford to leave them. Both served the same interest.
Noem’s proposed ESA program, announced in her final budget address before leaving for Washington, would have directed $4 million in state funds, roughly $3,000 per student, toward private school tuition and alternative instruction. In the Meade School District alone, nearly fifteen percent of school-age children were already enrolled in alternative instruction, a pattern that predated her proposal and represented approximately $3.5 million in enrollment funding the district was not receiving.
In rural and tribal South Dakota, where the nearest private school can be an hour’s drive and alternative curriculum providers are scarce, the freedom to choose is available only to those with the means to exercise it. The families whose public schools stood to lose the most were the least able to take advantage of what she was offering. The procedure that processed Fuller’s testimony proved to have a longer reach than Noem anticipated.
The system she served operates by the same logic she imposed on South Dakota's schoolchildren. Authoritarian formations do not reward fidelity; they reward utility, and the servant who becomes a liability is disposed of with the same efficiency applied to inconvenient historical testimony. In the weeks before her removal, Noem had authorized a $220 million advertising campaign featuring herself: on horseback at Mount Rushmore, in commercials airing on national television. Republican senators called it an abuse of public funds. Her department had also sent voluntary departure notices to undocumented immigrants through ICE — a crueler mechanism, and one that raised its own legal questions.
Her disposal came two days after her congressional testimony. Trump announced on social media that she would be replaced. She was the first Cabinet secretary to leave his second term. The announcement praised her service. The mechanism was structurally familiar: the process welcomed her, documented her, and continued without revision.
Fuller was seventeen years old when he stood at that microphone. He had prepared testimony. He had traveled to Pierre. He had named, in public, on the record, the genocide foundational to the land on which they were meeting. His words are still in the official record, still producing no consequence.
The system that processed Fuller's testimony processed Noem by the same procedure: present, documented, moved past.